Shield Maidens! True Or False?

My Wulfheodenas homie David Huggins asked me a good question. ”Shield maidens! True or False? Okay, that was a bit general, but female 'warrior' graves, symbolic or otherwise?”. I take this to mean “Were there female warriors in Northern Europe AD 500-1000?”

Let's start by examining why everyone accepts that there were male warriors. Indeed, to my knowledge most scholars believe that at least, say, 99.9% of all warriors were men, and conversely that a considerable percentage of free-born men received some degree of weapons training. There are two main reasons for this.

Firstly, the written sources of the time not only assume that fighting is done by men and child-rearing by women – they also describe a male ideal where you aren't really a man at all unless you're a warrior. Scandinavians believed that after death only those who died in battle would go to the part of heaven reserved for real men: Odin's mansion, Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain. Other people ended up in a dreary frigid underworld known as Hel and ruled by the goddess Hel. There may also have been a belief though, barely alluded to in surviving sources, that women's souls would take up residence in Freya's hall. And this opens the possibility that all the gods were believed to run boarding houses for souls of the dead. But still: the ideal male way of death was in battle.

Secondly, furnished burial is strongly gendered and this correlates with osteological sexing. Looking at richly furnished graves, you get weapon burials and jewellery burials, so dissimilar that you have to seriate them separately when you build chronology. The stuff they tend to share are things like pots and table knives. Almost always the weapon graves contain male-sex bones and the jewellery graves contain female-sex bones.

Every once in a very long while you get a jewellery grave with a single piece of weaponry in it, or vice versa. But in most cases those are cremation graves where it is impossible to know if (to pick a 6th century case from my dissertation about the Barshalder cemetery) the heavily armed cavalry man was buried with a dainty bead necklace around his neck or if his wife just put it on the pyre next to his feet as a parting gift. So it seems that if a few women were buried as warriors, their grave goods would be likely to be 100% weapon-gendered, not mixed.

Osteological sexing is a method with a margin of error. That margin is greater the more decomposed or cremated the skeleton is. And mis-sexing is biased towards masculinity, because old women who have worked hard have less feminine skeletal characteristics. David's question thus pertains only to an extremely rare class of source material: inhumation graves that contain well-preserved female skeletons and full weapon sets. I am not aware of any such grave in Scandinavia. To someone who looks at hundreds of graves in aggregate, such a burial is just noise in the data. If shown one, I'm perfectly willing to believe that the woman in question wielded the weapons she was buried with. But since they're so rare I don't pay them much attention.

Next important question: given the above, why does anyone believe that there were female warriors?

This is mainly because of a rather common motif in the High Medieval written sources: the valkyrie or shield-maiden. These are scary female warriors who hunt in airborne packs and select the slain in battles. They also occur in Dark Ages metalwork (e.g. Hårby) and tapestries (Oseberg). And they are clearly fictional supernatural beings. Alaric Hall, in his fine 2007 book about elf beliefs in Anglo-Saxon England, suggests that supernatural beings were imagined to be gender benders: elves were effeminate non-combatant males, valkyries were butch belligerent warrioresses. And neither of them were seen as human.

There are a few celebrated Early Modern cases where women dressed up as men and fought in wars. This was seen as deeply deviant at the time. And my guess is that late-1st-millennium situation was similar. Did any women ever fight? Yes, I'm sure some did, particularly when threatened by male warriors, as would have been an unfortunate fact of life in that barbaric age. But the ones who joined an armed retinue, lived the ideal warrior life and went to Valhalla must have been vanishingly few.

Finally, I should point out that to my mind the question whether there were in fact female warriors back then has no bearing on the issue whether women should be allowed today to be soldiers. It might be that that there were lots of female warriors in the Dark Ages but that everybody today should realise that this is an abomination. Or it might be that there were none back then but that we should see it as a great career for young women today. The past is not our mirror and archaeology must resist attempts to use its results or bend its interpretations for political purposes today.

More like this

Etymologically speaking, ”valkyrie” means ”chooser of the slain”. The job of these supernatural shield maidens in Norse mythology is to select who dies on the battlefield and guide their souls to Odin's manor, where they will spend the afterlife training for the Twilight of the Gods, the final…

In archaeology, we distinguish osteological sex from artefact gender. Osteo-sex is with very few exceptions (odd chromosomal setups) the same thing as what your genitals are like. Artefact gender is the material correlate of a role you play according to the conventions of your time: e.g. whether…

The Oseberg ship burial of Norway is a mind-blowing find, full of Early Viking Period carved woodwork and textiles of unparalelled quality. Dated by dendrochronology to AD 834, the long ship and its contents were sealed under a clay barrow, perfectly preserved when excavated in 1904. I consider…

In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is…

It seems to me that battlefields contain the skeletons of men who have been cut by weapons, but women are not, to my knowledge, found there.

To my knowledge, there is *some* substance for the existence of at least some female warrior burials among the Scythian/Sauromatian tribes north of the Black Sea (which apparently inspired somee Greek myths) but I have no way of knowing if it was common . Can the Greek myths have influenced North European mythology through the amber trade route? Other mythology influences: Celts?
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
"Elves were effeminate non-combatant males"
But...Elendil and Gil-Galad ???!!! Are you saying JRRT is an unreliable source (gasp!) ?

"To my knowledge, there is *some* substance for the existence of at least some female warrior burials among the Scythian/Sauromatian tribes north of the Black Sea (which apparently inspired somee Greek myths) but I have no way of knowing if it was common."

In both the Fianna and the Cattle Raid of Cooley, the main protagonists of each (Finn McCumhaill and Cuchulainn) are sent to be taught arms by women warriors. Is there any archeological evidence to back up there being warrior women in 1st-4thcentury CE insular Celtic culture?

Great article - thank you very much for writing it! Like the two commenters above, I'm most interested in the minority of cultures that did have female warriors. (There was also a West African kingdom whose king had a retinue of female bodyguards ... no, not the late unlamented Chairman Mo.) Why those societies and not their neighbors? Did they have more equality between the sexes overall, or a fighting style that was less dependent on brute force and size - or maybe they were just at the limit of their carrying capacity and unable to seize more territory, so that keeping all the women at home breeding as fast as possible was not an advantage?

My grandma was named (way back in 1917) after a mythical viking woman, Alfhild, who if I remember right was portrayed as a human woman as opposed to a valkyrie. Maybe it's like female pirates, a handful of historical examples that stand out because of their rarity. As Samuel Johnson said (of female preachers), they are like a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Eric, if I believed that I would a) not work in archaeology, b) not be willing to allocate it any public funding. History and archaeology finds out a lot about what actually happened in the past. They have some source-critical and sociology-of-science problems, but so do all other branches of Wissenschaft.

You don't need to look as far as to the Scythian area (and to quite another time, in fact) - there are several female graves with weapons in the area of present Latvia (mainly Livs), Estonia and Finland. Belonging to the late Viking Age or the 12th century, but perhaps also earlier times - such things can properly be seen only in inhumation graves, but we tended to have mixed cremations before. These are women with abundant jewellery but also some weapons - mainly spears, but sometimes also swords or axes. Not too many of them, but enough for not considering these burials as very exceptional.

In (ethnic) Baltic areas, biologically female skeletons have been found with weapons or other male set of artefacts; perhaps, these were female warriors who considered themselves males and belonged to some army. I don't think that "rich" female burials with some, sometimes even luxurious weapon(s) were necessarily female warriors. Although they could fight in emergency, or had fought in some time in their life, they seem to have been anyway defined predominantly as females in their society.

Grave furnishing is not at all so clearly gendered everywhere in the North, as it is in some areas. And, there is also a number of articles in English of this subject, published in the recent years, and mainly for the eastern coast of the Baltic though.

In the same northern half of the Eastern Baltic, where weapons sometimes occur in female graves (or "female" attributes in male graves, in that matter) weapons and more "male" accessories were nearly identical with Central-Swedish ones in the Viking Age. So, it was not at all some faraway area, but part of the same culture sphere...Quite a few female warriors mentioned in medieval narratives originated one or another way from the eastern areas. Was it now meant like that, or did medieval writers consider this phenomenon just so unusual that it needed to be explained with some foreign background :)

Very concise and interesting article. I particularly cherish your final comment and would ask leave to quote it! It encapsulates a couple of thorny discussions we have had recently.
" The past is not our mirror and archaeology must resist attempts to use its results or bend its interpretations for political purposes today."

There is at least one find of a woman with a weapons set (spear and battleaxe) and a neckwound - likely indicating a blow that would have severed the neck, in the Eastern Latvia. I can look up details on the burial field and grave number, if you are interessed.

It is dated to XI-XII century based on the gear, most likely XII. Find is from Aizkraukle area, not sure of specific place as of yet (everything here is a bit of a madhouse in preparation for Battle of Visby reenactment event).

Very interesting! Especially for someone who devoted his life to a female dominated martial art. All though women fighting along men in the field is almost non existent in history we must not forget how often they did so in siege warfare.

At the moment I am more of an enthusiast in the field as an independant researcher, while working on my masters in Geoarchaeology. A good friend of mine is working on compiling the information regarding the female burials with weapons and their circumstances, but since she is also preparing for BoW (we leave for it tomorrow) it is a bit hard to get the specifics out.

Finding this is my feed reader reminded me of another article I read earlier this year - http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-foug… - linking to the whole thing, but she includes within that, links to some studies showing a not insignificant number of Norse women came over to Britain early on, and appear to have been buried with warrior grave goods.

Norse women early on? In the immediate post-Roman period? Or during the Viking invasion? I haven't come across many mixed-gender furnished graves from England, though I can't say I'm very well read there. Nick Stoodley's 1999 book The Spindle and the Spear is the standard text on these issues.

That said though, I have to object to your first main reason. I too believe that 99.99% of the warriors where men but they were also probably the ones who got their history written. We don't know if the rest of the population thought that they where idiots just because they were male warriors. That hypothetical testimony would not survive, however.

Martin, I think that is a very reasonable position. My chief concern is with the people who try to insist that women must have almost never borne arms. In my opinion, those people give societies of peasants and farmsteads an unrealistic consistency and ability to enforce gender norms (and often oversimplify those norms or exaggerate what we can know about them). And they also have to admit too many exceptions (military historians stopped insisting that the only real war is pitched battles between two regular armies 40 years ago). So I might take another tack, emphasizing that while a few women probably fought, what evidence we have suggests that this would have been considered improper, and that I had seen hundreds of reports of a full weapon set with a male skull or pelvis and none with a full weapons set and female bones.

Aris and Marika, if these weapon graves with female skeletons have been published in English, German, or Latin I would happily read the reports.

When we get back from Battle of Visby event I will get the specifics on that burial. On the top of my head I also remember female burial from Lithuania (Pavervite-Gudi burial field) where you have a typical female grave goods and a spear, which was positioned in the same way as in male burials with weapons (i.e., laid alongside the deceased.)

Warning 1: Some people with sadly twisted minds might consider this unsuitable for work. At work you should be working anyway. This is 'definitely' in the fun category, now that it is solely for entertainment.

Warning 2: At 01:03, the Drums of Hell start up - if you have the volume up too loud, it's going to cause aural pain.

Remember, these are the people who beat the British - and the Brits had guns. The Zulus didn't.

There was at least one Native American Indian female burial that was likely of a warrior woman at a burial relocation project my former employer carried out. This was a female burial with a chert "sword" and no other grave goods. She had healed depressed skull fractures that indicated she likely saw combat.

A number of First Nations in the 19th century had a way to change gender, either between male and female or to a third gender. In those nations, men who didn't want to be warriors or women who did often used that custom. Its an interesting example of how strong gender norms can interact with human diversity. But I don't know any evidence of similar customs amongst the Norse.

This is probably covered in Arch 101 but surely the key question for any interpretation of burial goods is why they were buried with the body? Were they goods that the dead person was assumed to need in an afterlife ? Did a person in their afterlife use the same goods as they used in life? Or were their needs idealised? Who selected them? Were they the goods of the dead person or special goods for burial? Was their selection to impress people who the dead person would meet in the afterlife, or to impress the people present at their burial? Was their selection a representation of the person, or of their position (or supposed position)?
Might a female person be perceived to need a weapon in the afterlife, which they might not have used in life? Might the same apply to a male?

I always tell the students that a grave is not a person. It is a work of art made up of a dead body and other materials. More specifically, it's a portrait, and for each burial site we need to figure out the portraiture conventions. It's never photo realism.

Hi. I'm late to the discussion but I want to add something. The burials might have been formalities where certain gendered cultural norms were performed (does that make sense?). Therefore, a female would be buried with jewelry and a male with weapons, regardless of their occupation in life. For example, it is possible that the medieval Scandinavians would bury a female with a necklace regardless of if she had been a warrior or farmer. If you consider this, you might then say that while it was normative for females at the time to NOT be in combat, it doesn't mean that they were never in combat. For example, in the contemporary Western world, a woman might be buried in a dress and high heels regardless of if she spent most of her time in life wearing trousers in the navy or a doctor's coat. IMHO, looking at a grave only tells you about burial practices. It might also tell you about WHY they had these practices, but it does not give you a 100% accurate picture of the way people lived. Also, if you look at medieval Scandinavian laws, women were valued and protected for their childbearing roles. It is possible that if women took on arms in the name of protecting their children or families (or the children and families of their people) they were still buried as "women" and not as men.

I agree. A grave is not a person, it is a portrait, a piece of art. So as I said, I believe we should look at the generalities of the roles depicted in burial, not speculate about individual cases. Archaeologists don't produce the same kind of knowledge as historians do.

Donate

ScienceBlogs is where scientists communicate directly with the public. We are part of Science 2.0, a science education nonprofit operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Please make a tax-deductible donation if you value independent science communication, collaboration, participation, and open access.

You can also shop using Amazon Smile and though you pay nothing more we get a tiny something.

More by this author

As I learned a few hours ago, and as a few other Sb bloggers have already announced, Scienceblogs.com will shut down at the end of this month. I'm going to move Aard and continue my blogging, but I haven't figured out where to move it yet. Suggestions from you, Dear Reader, are most welcome.
It…

Medieval account books were so common in Germany and considered to be so worthless, that into the early 19th century they were used as fuel to heat certain archives.
Got nominated to the municipal council. Not likely to be high on the list, but still, feels good to be considered useful.
I was…

Ben Aaronovitch = Benjamin Aaronson wrote The Rivers of London. I wonder if it's a pen name for my grandpa's grandpa Aaron Benjaminson, who was a farmer in Tanum.
Two students are trying to play verbal chess while digging. The board is in their heads.
"Well, I'm not the world's most physical guy /…

Habilitation, docentur, is a symbolic upgrade to your PhD found in Scandinavia and other countries with a strong element of German academic traditions. You can think of it as a boy-scout badge. It confers no salary, but it opens certain doors including that of supervising doctoral candidates.…

More reads

"In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time." -Richard K. Morgan
It’s absolutely true that, in quantum mechanics, there are certain pairs of properties that we simply can’t measure simultaneously. Measure the position of an object really well, and its momentum becomes more…

In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself…

Blurring, chopping and blocking. Three online items this week all deal with some pretty dynamic phenomena.
The blurring is in our perceptions. It turns out that if you even think you have lost money in an experiment, your ability to distinguish between musical notes will be hampered. What’s the connection? Dr. Rony Paz has been showing that this tendency to lump sounds together is tied to fear.…